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Global Pulse: Reviving the art of disagreement, welcome Saudi Arabia to the twentieth century

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‘Shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak’

“Disagreement is the way I’ve always earned a living,” said Bret Stephens as he began his lecture on the “dying art of disagreement” at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney. What followed were some of the most incisive and moving words that can can be uttered in this world of echo chambers. Here are some excerpts:

“To disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.”

“For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.”

“The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.”

“In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.”

“Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.”

He gives the example of the Australian debate on same-sex marriages to corroborate his point. “I suspect the No’s will exceed whatever they are currently polling. That’s because the case for same-sex marriage is too often advanced not by reason, but merely by branding every opponent of it as a ‘bigot’ — just because they are sticking to an opinion that was shared across the entire political spectrum only a few years ago. Few people like outing themselves as someone’s idea of a bigot, so they keep their opinions to themselves even when speaking to pollsters. That’s just what happened last year in the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election, and look where we are now.”

“Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated. But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.”

Welcome Saudi Arabia to the twentieth century

Saudi women shall now drive. Ending a longstanding policy of the ultraconservative kingdom, a royal decree stated that the Saudi ban on women drivers will be lifted with effect from June 2018 – making the kingdom the last the world to permit women behind the wheel.

The announcement is a culmination of a decades-long struggle, which saw women protesters behind bars and conservative men come up with some of the most ridiculous justifications for the ban. This 2011 Foreign Affairs piece delineates some of them:

Saudi women don’t really want to drive to begin with. They’re not oppressed, they’re princesses! It’s a mistake to associate freedom of movement with true liberation. Obviously. Driving means being harassed by constant catcalls. The king knows best. Giving women the freedom to move around on their own would be to tempt God’s wrath. Simply put, God says women drivers are evil and deserve to die.

Before winning 13.3 percent of the vote, AfD won the Twitter war

What went behind the first openly nationalist party entering the German parliament since the second world war? The answer may be simpler, yet, scarier than what one might think. Twitter. Set targets, instructions, an arsenal of memes glorifying Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the AfD and denouncing Islam, the EU and the “old parties”, and a massive, tightly organised troll army, to be precise.

“If the tone was that of a game, the impact was emphatically real: AfD’s massive vote gains reflect the extreme right’s ability to conquer online space and win the information war with sophisticated obfuscation and disruption tactics,” writes Julia Ebner in The Guardian. “By scheduling a time each evening and agreeing on hashtags, they forced the Twitter algorithms to prioritise their posts. It was thanks to this tactic that they managed to catapult #Schicksalswahl, # TrauDichdeutschland, #NichtmeineKanzlerin and #MerkelMussWeg into the top Twitter trends in Germany. In the two-week run-up to the election, not a single day passed when #AfD was not in the top two trending hashtags in Germany.”

Kim, Trump and mixed signals 

Who would have thought that behind all the high-decibel rhetoric, North Korean officials would have quietly been trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in order to make sense of Trump?

But reaching out does not mean giving in. As David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post, Trump’s comments “may have closed any remaining doors to a quick diplomatic resolution of the standoff”.

“By responding personally to Trump’s bluster and issuing his own counterthreats, Kim has attached his personal prestige and his family’s demigod status to the confrontation.”

“Kim may seek another round of escalation. One possibility is an intercontinental ballistic missile test, arcing far out over the Pacific, to demonstrate North Korea’s range. North Korea could perhaps even mount a hydrogen warhead atop one of these missiles so that it exploded in the ocean, though that would risk prompt U.S. retaliation. The North Koreans could also test submarine-launched ballistic missiles to demonstrate a second-strike capability following any U.S. preemptive attack.”

 

 

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